Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of InnovationReally intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.

Star star teach me how to shine shine
Teach me so I know what's going on in your mind
'Cause I don't understand these people
Who say the hill's too steep
Well they talk and talk forever
But they just never climb - The Frames' "Star Star"

One day my friend Ruby handed me some tomatoes and zucchinis from her backyard. One day they spoke to me, and their edible love brought tears to my ears.

I once watched the animating force drain away from a live squid taken from a fisherman's cage in that otherworldly azure bay spread before Phi Phi Don and Koh Jum islands, and watched that squid die before my feet while the motorboat zoomed that Christmas Day 2004 (day before the fateful tsunami). Within weeks, I was eating my favorite Thai basil with squid dish again. One day last summer, I simply stopped eating meat.

One day the world lightened up, and I with it.

"I don't think being tight and strict is healthy, in general," he says, adding that if you are going to eat a Big Mac, at least be conscious and enjoy yourself while you are doing it.

"As you transition from cooked to raw food, you'll be drawn to more and more living foods. You'll eat that way because you want to, not because you think you want to. The change will just happen. You don't have to try because it's not about willpower." - Rod Rotondi, owner of LA's Leaf Cuisine, "We Like It Raw", May 2007, Common Ground Magazine

I stopped being an environmental activist sometime in 2001. My last convert was my sister. Partly exhausted. But so too, somewhere my yearning to commune with people from all walks of life won out over persuading people what they ought to be and ought to do. I simply wanted to understand them as they were.

I'm a guilt-free green; an eco-epicurean. I bite my tongue and try not say too much about activism. Especially any activism against activists ;-)

I figure my example speaks loud and clear enough for itself. Other friends chided, "Why don't you get your car fixed?" (This was back when I did have the money to repair it.) "Wouldn't that make your life more convenient?"

I don't understand convenient. I do understand how my life has blossomed without a car.

I notice that the Live Earth concert's promotion is going gangbusters. I receive the Live Earth Twitter messages; pithy tips like: Ironing clothes. Nearly 12
million pounds of hazardous solvents are released into the air yearly
by our dry cleaners. Liveearth.org. 10:19 AM June 11, 2007

There's an organic drycleaners at the stripmall closest to my house. I have to pass by the sacred grove of sequoias, the flock of ebony ravens, and countless other beings on my way there. What on earth would I need drycleaned though? And I couldn't find my iron if my life depended on it. I'm not sure I own one, anymore. No one convinced me. No one could have convinced me. Ironing just dropped away from my life like an old worn shoe.

Star star teach me how to shine shine
Teach me so I know what's going on in your mind
'Cause I don't understand these people
Who say the hill's too steep
Well they talk and talk forever
But they just never climb - The Frames' "Star Star"

If you've ever had a real heart-to-heart conversation with Gaia, you'll see she is precisely attuned on her evolutionary spiral journey. She's on track with her destiny. (She'll nudge you towards a remembrance that the word, destiny, is a code, a secret handshake between old friends. A trigger bringing back our attention to the Deity ESTablished INYou.) Then she challenges: Are you living your destiny, your Highest Self?

Summer, for me, is a time of live meals. Of lightness. I think that's why I'm smitten with Twitter. Simple. Spontaneous. Flirtatious. No craft, no technique, no scripting, no editing, no hemming and hawing, no trying to achieve the perfect post. Now, and now, before you blink - just blurt your heart out.

I'll certainly be blogging and twittering this Summer of Love 2007. Plus stuff of a more ephemeral artful nature is afoot at my Summer of Love pad in S.F. (Please swing by when I move in end of month.) Though the stockier stew of word-drenched essays may take a backseat for a while as I whip up frequent quirkier morsels of ambrosia.

"Practical imagination may be more in line with having beautiful radiant things, but idle imagination is more in line with being beautiful radiant things. But Being, idleness,and productivity coming together these days." - Steven Suggs' comment on "in praise of idle imagination"

Yes! yes, I write back, and: "I sense that imagination needs FREE rein to be as goofy, outrageously unproductive, uncontrived, boundless as it wants to be. And miracles are actually as efficient, and natural, as it gets."

"Whatever your naive beliefs about information wanting to be free, Murphy is not being a bad guy by doing so. [In contacting a Japanese TV network to ask them to contact YouTube to pull down a video he produced for said network]." - "Surfer beware: YouTube is a copyright infringement minefield", Times-Picayune, April 27, 2007 (sidebar story on pg 12-13)

I don't think that Murphy is doing anything wrong either. I'd love to see more original & indie content - not cut-and-paste, not television - myself.

Naïve as in: "Spontaneous. Never Ordinary. Completely Genuine." Those are the title words to a Jazz Appreciation Month (April 2007) poster I saw once (maybe at the Alvar Public Library who knows) put out by the Smithsonian.

Naïve is an amazing way to live...and free, as in liberty, and quite probably, free, as in gifts too. These words, concepts, dance well together.

I'm reminded of a beautiful passage in Dreams Underfoot, where the character Zinc, a seventeen-year-old performance artist/runaway squatting in a downtown building in a fictional city, is musing to himself, after an exchange with his visual artist friend Jilly:

"You didn't make art by capturing an image on paper, or canvas, or in stone. You didn't make it by writing down stories and poems. Music and dance came closest to what real art was - but only as long as you didn't try to record or film it. Musical notation was only so much dead ink on paper. Choreography was planning, not art.

You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.

Everything that existed, existed in a captured state. Animate or inanimate, everything wanted to be free.

That's what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn't neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight?

Oh, and ubuntu's not an ideology as per Wikipedia. It's not sustainable as a way of thinking, it's a way of being rooted in a felt sense of the indivisible wholeness of Life: that unshakable sense that the creative life-force that pulses through and animates me, dances through you, and is us. ("I am that which animates the body," Peace Pilgrim once said.)

"The apparent happiness of Africans, against all horror, seems to
derive from a sense of connectedness, or as the Zulu put it,
"ubunto." This word is often translated to mean community, but one of
them gave me what I
think is a more accurate definition: "I am
because we are; we are because I am."" - John Perry Barlow, The Pursuit of Emptiness

p.s. On the theme of ubuntu, one of my all time favorite books is set in the Africa of his childhood and written by African shaman Malidome Some,Of Water and the Spirit.

Jan 09, 2007

I stepped off the Aeromexico flight and right away I knew that even the extra days I spent to 'acclimate' in one of the largest cities on the planet - and, yes, to see with my own jaguar eyes the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera home - hardly prepared me for the landing in Las Vegas.

I had re-entered a new territory, and this terrain came without sidewalks. Not even cracked tottering foot-high sidewalks like in the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Later that evening, my mom who lives in Las Vegas, drove us to the off-strip casino with the adjacent shopping center and we entered into the cavernous cacophany of the Cheesecake Factory.

The street vendor's tamales at the Oaxaca market, the steaming chocolate at the neighborhood cafe in Quetzaltenago a few alley zig-zags from the town square, the tortillas and the sweet pineapple Christmas-fruit drink (and, yes, you can spike it) that Erica made were still vivid to my tongue, to my nose, to my eyes, to my skin right then.

It's now three years later. Today, the aromas are a waft of memory. But some caresses leave fingerprints like they've never left your body though the touch is no longer evident by sight of a hand.

My eyes did not quite register the 360 degree dominos of marquee neon signs, and water fountains synchronicized to symphonies as I drove my mom's car into asphalt football field-sized parking lots of the convention center. Armies upon armies of HDTVs spinning scenes and MP3 players assaulted me as I entered "the largest technology industry event." (This year 140,000 attendees are expected according to the San Jose Merc.)

Las Vegas may not yet be my favorite city in the world, but I'd never ever had such a visceral reaction like this before. AndI've never been back to CES since.

I'd just spent seven weeks in Mexico, Guatamala, and a brief sojourn at the Copan ruins in Honduras when I went to CES 2004. The family I lived with for more than three weeks in Quetzaltenago took me in as their daughter, and I lived with their grandmother, grandfather, Erica's sister and her boy, and their own son and daughter. I went shopping with the family, strolled the streets in December following the neighborhood processions of revelers, ate three square meals a day all including hordes of tortillas in the kitchen, watched the Simpsons dubbed in Spanish with the boy, changed ringtones on teenager Jessica's new cellphone, ate barbequed pork and joined in on the firecracker frenzy when celebrating Christmas and New Year's with their extended families.

I wasn't disgusted by Las Vegas. That's not it. I simply...

Ached. There was a longing like the longing a baby that's been left in the crib for too long might have to be held by its mother.

I don't know need to try to dig up my journal from the trip right now to tell you the thought that kept ringing through my head over and over:

This city isn't built to human scale.

I was in Manhattan this September. I found myself walking as much as I ever did in Quetzaltenago, Guatemala. Walking to the meteoritic hole where twin towers once stood (on 9-11-06), walking to the Alex Grey gallery, walking to the Whitney Museum to meet Senia, walking to meet Rita for lunch and then walking through the flower district with her to see her artwork hanging at her apartment, walking that weekend to the yoga workshop in that little Cuban enclave near the Lower East Side, walking to the deli with Tom in Little Italy, walking through the smattering of darling boutiques and cafes in NoLita (adore Nolita).

Walking, walking, walking. Waltzing! Have you ever noticed that walking and waltzing are first cousins?

Walking connects me with the touch and movement and breath of humans.

Maybe that's the real reason that when my car left me stranded at the Colma BART Station this past November 2nd, I was not very inclined to fix it.

Sauntering: not
a tour, but a never-ending enterprise. Playful and serious. Thoreau
discovers his own etymology for the word. The saunterer may begin, he
says, in the familiar fields of Concord, and some time later find
himself in a place where "...jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which
the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested." - Joshua McKinney, Saunter

I say walking. Henry David Thoreau says walking but likes sauntering even better.

Sauntering's roots are tangled with meditating and musing too. And moreover, it means: "Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre,
without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean,
having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere," writes Thoreau.

"To use an obsolete Latin word, I might
say Ex oriente lux; ex occidente Frux.From the East light;from the West fruit." - Henry David Thoreau, Walking

So I smile when I read the CES coverage in the San Jose Mercury News this morning. Sub-headline: DOT-COM GLITZ IS DROPPED FOR FRUITFUL CONNECTIONS

"HP did briefly toy with the idea of bringing in big-name celebrities,
but decided against that. "You don't get the value from it,'' said
Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of HP's PC business. "It's
about building relationships, and the only way to build relationships
is with that face time.'' - "Parties Take on a Different Life," San Jose Mercury News, January 9, 2007

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nicked and Dimed shares in her brand-new released-today book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that "human beings are innately social, naturally
taking part in celebrations and festivities that involve feasting,
dancing and dressing up. Though these impulses have been suppressed at
times,...they can never be kept down; the need for
communal joy is a core feature of humanity."

My umbrella prediction (which all other predictions tumble out of) is that 2007 is the year that the Web is likened to a communal table rather than a printing press. Sans piping hot tortillas perhaps or perhaps not, but a gathering that exuberantly explores that human impulse towards collective joy and the delight of sauntering into people on the sidewalk.

Bonus: "We had a remarkable sunset one day
last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook,
when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold grey day, reached
a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest brightest morning sun-
light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite
horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our
shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only
motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a
moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was
wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this
was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would
happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure
the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where
no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on
cities, and perchance, as it has never set before,—where there is but a
solitary marsh hawk to have his wings guilded by it, or only a musquash
looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in
the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round
a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the
withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright—I thought I had
never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it.
The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary
of elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving
us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land;
till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall
perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives
with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side
in autumn." - excerpted from essay Walking, Henry David Thoreau

You know, a step quirkier than the typical magazine cutout what-I-envision-want-desire collage.

In 2002 my question was "What is the meaning of my life?" (Well, I think it was more in the vein of "What the @#*%$! is this about anyway?"). In 2005 my question was "What is deathless?" I'm not to sure what my hypothesis is this for year quite yet, but hey it took me months in junior high to come up with my science fair topic. (Lucky I'm a lot quicker these days.)

"Albert Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile. He hypothesized that your answer to that question would determine your destiny." - Wikiquote on Albert Einstein

I click with how Robert Scoble has been answering it. It gets to the heart of why I'm really stepping back into social media again.

I was talking to Adrian Chan a few months ago and I tell him I almost got out of technology altogether back in 1994. I stayed in because this thing came along called the Internet that was connecting people to people, it wasn't just human interfacing to machine. He tells me that's why he's into social media too, because he fundamentally cares about "the social fabric of humanity." And I think we were both silent for a second after he said that.

Last week I met hundreds of Americans in four cities. That experience made me much more optimistic about the future.

One guy, in particular, gave me a tour of his FEMA trailer in a
poor, decimated, New Orleans neighborhood and then took me inside his
stripped-out home that had been flooded eight feet deep with water and
muck. He was black. I was white. Not that that matters, but in previous
decades I probably wouldn’t have been invited into his home. He had an
awesome attitude, despite the crap that life had dealt him. He made me
optimistic once again that we can take on tough challenges and come
through with a laugh, a smile, and a great joke about it all.

But, then I realized why he had a great attitude. He had friends who
were helping him rebuild his house. They were working on making their
neighborhood better. One stud at a time, one of them told me.

They made me optimistic that my son will see a better world than
I’ve seen. One where we can figure out how to bootstrap communities out
of poverty. One where we see the last vestiges of “isms” disappear. One
where we help each other out — one nail at a time, if need be. - Robert Scoble, "2007 Edge Question: what are you optimistic about?"

And this snippet ties it together. Yep, porches and enough banana pudding for the block are the glue of social capital - I kid you not:

"One other thing Ed has is this infectuous love of politics and love of
his local community. I didn’t really grok why so many great American
politicians come out of the south until Maryam and I visited a local
neighborhood party and had banana pudding on the front lawn of some
guy’s house. It was like a Web 2.0 party in San Francisco, except there
was a collegiality that just doesn’t happen in SF parties (they are
getting too big, for one). I think it was all due to the banana
pudding. Maryam and I have been craving it ever since. That stuff is
like crack." - Robert Scoble, "Ed Cone, combo of politics, tech, community"

Dec 22, 2006

1.I'm not as anti-Christmas as I thought I was. Normally I wouldn't be here. I'd be somewhere sultry and exotic and as far away from the shopping hordes as possible. Somewhere like Quetzaltenango, Guatemala or sea-kayaking in New Zealand or Phi Phi Island, Thailand or tracking jaguar paw prints along the beach of Corcovado, Costa Rica or... Quite often for six or seven or nine weeks at a time.

I don't do Xmas cards or Xmas trees or Xmas gifts. I'm more likely to give you a gift out of the blue on September 19th or July 1st, than December 25th.

If I go as far back as I can recall, I remember the first Christmas I spent in Miami I wrote a story and personally illustrated and hand-bound with yarn. While at some levels I moved up in the world trading in bermuda grass for the asphalt playgrounds of Newark, I was nostaglic for snow. So my story revolved around the gleeful first snowfall in Miami and it occured on Christmas day.

"Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love." - Hamilton Wright Mabie

As gifts, I enjoyed making and giving handmade art books of my favorite Christmas carols scribed as lovingly as the monks penned the Book of Kells. Fine, I exaggerate, perhaps as devotional as any nine-year-old or eleven-year-old can be. (In one of your lifetimes, you must go to Trinity College in Dublin and drink of the Book of Kells for yourself.)

2. I was Ugly Betty. Although I don't watch TV (you already know that), I've seen Ugly Betty grace the covers of magazines while I stand in line at the grocery counter. So I look at her on that cover and this is what I see: Hispanic girl with long dark hair (mine was far frizzier, hey it's humid in Miami), braces (hers are more fashionable than mine), glasses, socially awkward and painfully shy, her parents probably won't buy her the right (read: expensive) brand of jeans either, no doubt excels in mathematics and chemistry, hangs out in the library and reads Charles Dickens and Jane Austen for fun... Check.

I was a late bloomer then. And in every aspect of Beauty still am today. I'm finally okay with that.

3. I'd rather read erotica at an open-mic than (gasp) a prayer. Alright I'm ultra-shy reading erotica in public too, but I've made myself do it. I was walking past an Asian man sitting comfortably in the lobby of The Palace Hotel during Web 2.0 on my way out the door with Stowe Boyd. And in the corner of my eye, I spot him reading The Energy of Prayer by Thich Nhat Hanh . My first impression: "Whoa, that takes guts to be here out in the wide open with that book."

I received The Energy of Prayerfrom a publicist in June. Normally I get business books sent for potential review, nothing like this. What a timely gift that book was.

Prayer adds a devotional awestruck wondrous quality to life. I think the most unsettling part of the book I started drafting in May was that the sex read like prayer, and the prayer read like making love. I usually speak from metaphor and symbol, yet even in the literal it totally made sense to me, but I worry about what they would think.

So, whew, there you have it. I love writing prayers (no specific religion, in the "prayer and a candle", "my religion is love" vein) and I am going to be working with a visual
artist and maybe musicians to illustrate, to sing the prayers I pen.

4. In a past life, I was a minstrel. Gulp, first prayer. Now, past life recall? I believe know only thought reincarnates, yet on the relative realm, I can when and if I'm not freaked out by clairvoyance get downloads of bits and pieces of the so-called 'past' and 'future'.

I have a soul fashioned for wandering, for courtly love ("winning one's heart, not the bed" and I picture Dante and Beatrice or Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo), and for sound, vibration, voice, the sway of rhythm, poetics, the shared word.

When I'm not blogging, my writing tends to be lyrical. Leaning towards a Beat-poet jazz-improv style that's impossible to skim and difficult to grasp. I think you just listen aloud like a symphony and forget about whether you capture each metaphor, since the next note is coming right up. As it gets difficult to grasp onto, your mind surrenders and maybe, just maybe, is lulled into the Gap.

Even though today the first thing I see when I open the front door is a piano (my housemate's a musician), I realize I have effectively managed to shut music off from my entire life.

No more - the music of the spheres has permanently seeped in and the Muses want to play.

Ar em al freg temps vengut

quel gels el neus e la fainga

el aucellet estan mut,

c'us de chanter non s'afrainga;

Now we are come to the cold time

when the ice and the snow and the mud

and the birds' beaks are mute

(for not one inclines to sing) - attributed to 12th c. Azalais de Porcairaques

5. I walked the streets this year. That's practically all I did.From Phuket to Khao Lak to Colombo to Galle to Palo Alto to Los Gatos and many parts in between, I spent almost every part of this year offline talking and observing more people face-to-face than I have my entire life previous. Punctuated by extremely brief spurts of blogging, and a few emails that required attention (I'm notoriously always behind). Not watching YouTube, not scouring Techmeme, pretty much not any of it if it involved booting up a laptop and staring at a screen instead of a person.

"Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life?" - Somerset Maugham

My neo-Luddite phase is behind me and I like how Peter Hamlin in Dialogue: The Fine Art of Conversation puts it:

Technology

can either be used for more efficient isolation or more meaningful intimacy

Dialogue

is an opportunity to further develop this theme

I think that's what I care about intensely these days, intimacy and relationships and god I hate that word, but whatever, social capital. Not the kind of social capital that scores you an executive post at a Silicon Valley start-up (but not excluding that either) but the kind of social capital that sustains us together as humans. The kind of social capital where a neighbor that knows your name walks up to your door to enthusiastically show you the new robin on the block through their binoculars, or that time you've got a sore throat and a cold, a so-called homeless stranger you just met texts you: "would ice cream make it better?"

Just like my favorite writing blurs reality and fantasy, I'm intrigued by the blurring and the sweeping back and forth through the frontiers and borders of the online and offline.

Teahouses historically connote "social intimacy." So I don't think I've ever blurted this out in so many words online yet: I'm opening sometime somehow next year a teahouse that will be a hub, a nexus, a salon for the virtual and the visceral, media and the immediate, art and life.

"In contrast to the West, where tea is marked by its aristocratic
associations, in the East tea is a dietary staple for one and all, and
a sign of hospitality even in the humblest of surroundings. Chinese
tea houses, India's roadside tea stalls, Afghan chaikhanas, and the
little cafes of Turkey and Egypt are democratic and lively - the
opposite of tea rooms in Europe... From the Mediterranean to the Pacific, teas are as varied as the people they unite. - Sangmanee, Kitti Cha et al, The Little Book of Tea

Dec 01, 2006

In another time I'd have just packed him up to the bus station and plucked down my credit card for his bus ticket to New Orleans myself. BTW, I talk to people, including street people all the time.

Wyatt's different. He went into denial when Katrina hit. He was touring around on the road, playing music in Humboldt, CA when it hit.

I got the long version of story, he's very cool, very much at a turning point where he can face the loss of everything he'd known in Nola and is ready to go back and rebuild and contribute. He's got a great attitude considering, and he manages to score a roof over his head more often than not and makes a little money playing guitar on the street; so he pretty clean.

"To this day I still never reached 95% of the people on my phone list. And the people I cared about the most I only knew from their first names, that's the scene I'm in we only know first names, like Math from "I Hate God" [band]."

He was telling me about the 1964 Beatles mixing console that's gone forever ("the recording studio was on the edge of the Ninth Ward").

He's a musician, recording engineer, and seems to be a bit of a geek -- knows how to code a bit in C++ and Java and HTML and his nickname is "Wire".

Funny thing, now I think about it, that the most vitally interesting part of the story of 'disaster' and 'loss' is the aftermath, the wake, the recovery. Nearly no one asks me about that myself, mostly people want to hear about the very day of the tsunami.

Thankfully I was in no position myself to hand him a bus ticket (he never asked, it was what I would have wanted to do) or even a quarter. I hunched down to ground level to chat with him and look directly into his peacock blue eyes:

"So are you from Palo Alto?" "Naw. Stranded. I'm from New Orleans. A woman in Belmont gave me a roof last night, dropped me off here."

So instead I came up with a better idea that is a social media experiment...and relies on what Larry Harvey, Burning Man founder, calls connective transactions.

"The great efficiency of the modern marketplace depends on the fluidity of value as it flows in one form of commodity to another. If I should buy something from you, no relationship and no moral connection is left to relate us to one another. The value of the money I have spent speeds on to take new form as further goods and services. This is the fuel that powers our economy and produces a flow of never-ending capital around the world.

But what this transaction does not necessarily produce is connections between people. It does not produce what Robert Putnam and other writers have described as "social capital." Social capital is a very different concept. Social capital represents the sum of human connection that holds a society together, and it is fostered by networks of personal relationship. It is social capital that a culture is made of." - "Viva Las Xmas", transcript of speech by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, April 25, 2002

Part of my idea involves getting bloggers and the like to videoblog him each day as he wends his way back to Nola in a "connective" manner.

And maybe we'd help him get to the next leg on his journey using online tools (whether Craigslist to score a ride to Austin, or MySpace to post his music and get a small audience following him on the road, or CouchSurfing.com for a place to crash, etc etc).

Few people know what it's like to have everything you know pulled out from under you, and then go through the stages of denial, anger, resolution, etc. He admits he spent too long in denial, but he also seems to see it retrospectively as a growth opportunity. And getting back on his own to Nola is like a test, like an odyssey, for him.

"So why can't your recording studio boss just get you a ticket home? You said he wanted you back to help rebuild it."

"It's kinda a test."

"He's testing you? Or you testing yourself?"

"Little of both."

I have his cell and email...and I don't know how long he'll be in Palo Alto (I live about 25 miles south, just happened to be there yesterday for an IDEO author talk, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die), he's trying to head south as soon as possible. I figure if he can pull together bus fare, he can stay at my place tonight.

"So what do you think was mixed on that Beatles console?" I ask Wyatt.

Nov 29, 2006

Rare, if ever, that I've called a corporate blog a work of art. Most honestly bore me. But I'm highly impressed by Bento Box. My impression of BzzAgent from their first corporate blog was it was a highly controversial arena (word-of-mouth buzz marketing) to be launching such an incredibly transparent no-holds-barred blog.

Naked, you could say. (Patrick, Robert Scoble's teenage son said he fielded questions from school buddies about his dad's porn book. The business blogging tome is titled Naked Conversations.) Fresh blood, Ginsberg could say. Refreshing, I say.

Here's three reasons I find it delectable:

Tom Parker, a local writer and instructor in Palo Alto, once said that memoir and fiction writing plays with time. One can stretch five minutes into fifty pages or squeeze fifty years into five paragraphs. Well, blogging is a different animal. Time marches fairly linearly on a reverse-chronological time-stamped blog. I've wondered about the linearity of time and how to unhinge from it on a blog. I've wondered how to play with space, rather than time, via a blog. I've wondered how to experiment with an art installation using a blog. And so I had to smile when I got an email announcing the Bento Box. "Think part Blog, part art
show, part essay, part media experience," they said. Aha, great minds think alike ;-)

How many companies you know hire two artists-in-residences and allow them simply observe untethered the inner workings of a corporation and then freely express their observations online? None come readily to my mind except BzzAgent. I mean one of the early sketches/posts had a dangling penis forgodsakes! And they still didn't squelch the artist on his second penis portrayal either (or is the plural penii, anyhow you'll have to search yourself to find that post).

"For the next twelve fortnights (24 weeks, or 168 days, or 4,032 hours), The Bento Box will be open for dining." Limited edition. This season only. It's just me probably, but I adore limited edition. I prefer hand-cranked-one-of-a-kind-never-to-be-repeated because there's plenty more creativity where that came from over cookie-cutter-mass-produced lets-churn-this-cash-cow-out until we're all bored to tears. Plus I like how they slying unveil burlesque-style the 168-day installation: "Each business day, another piece of the box will be available for
viewing."

Nov 25, 2006

"We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor." - His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Mesmerized by this quote above hanging from a scroll at the Land of the Medicine Buddha temple bookstore a few weeks back, I repeat it on the drive back home from Soquel, to my friend Ruby. I'm spouting off about my renewed interest in social media (which frankly dropped to below zero since the tsunami) and intimacy and neighborhoods and third places and...

(For me it would be disingenuous to say I care about social capital, social networking, social software, social media and not even know my neighbor's first name or hang out the neighborhood cafe. If you saythe point is people then one walks the walks not just talks the talks.)

...and she stops me: "So how's your relationship with your family?"

With Ruby's question, the thought ecplised me instantly that for me it would be disingenuous to care about social capital, social networking, social software, social media and be distant from my own family: all of it ripples in concentric circles from the inside out.

"No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity, if you can't look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?" - Lee Iacocca

Many days, especially those frustrating ones, I could dismiss family as simply people in my life by virtue of the accident of birth. Though I'm not even so sure about that accident theory anymore.

"The ones that last are the ones where there’s at least one in-person interaction. People you’ve had a meal with, whose house you’ve slept in are the ones you can build that relationship with." - Shannon Clark on relationships in online communities, "Is there intimacy in social media?", Web 2.2 conference notes

Since I've had at least 22 years of meals and sleepovers with my family of origin, I guess we might have something to build on. So why the heck in this Sex in the City age is it easier to share body (and maybe soul) with a complete stranger than to have a heartful conversation with someone that's known you for decades?

Those breezy SITC hook-ups aren't exactly my style, yet this remarkable year I've have heart-to-heart encounters ranging from passing windows-into-the-soul gazes to hours-long tete-a-tetes in cafes and bookstores and galleries and antiques shops and bank teller windows and trains on average of once a day with complete strangers of all ages and all walks of life.

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone -- Walt Whitman, from To A Stranger

Family, well, maybe it's that there is more history - to cherish, and to bury, to unburden - than with fresh momentary shooting stars.

Perfect strangers. Less-than-perfect family:

'Let us agree to give up love,And root up the Infernal Grove;Then shall we return and seeThe worlds of happy Eternity.

'And throughout all EternityI forgive you, you forgive me.As our dear Redeemer said:"This the Wine, and this the Bread."'

-- William Blake, from Broken Love

At the eleventh hour, I found myself heading to Craigslist to rely on a complete stranger to catch a ride down to LA to see family this past Wednesday. (Thanks Ravi and Andy for replying...)

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city." - George Burns

Fleeing from Cuba after Castro's takeover, my young parents arrive penniless and English-illiterate to a strange land with people they didn't grow up with and play ball with and go to dances with and giggle about secret admirers with and stroll the park on Sundays with. They drilled it into my head growing up, "Don't talk to strangers." By which they meant anyone outside the inner circle of family is to remain forevermore a stranger.

Over the decades I turn my over-protective upbringing comes full circle and I find myself implicitly trusting complete strangers... and I don't talk to family.

At 9 a.m. Thanksgiving Thursday the Craigslist 'strangers' thing is falling through completely. I meditate, I pray and I silently query myself, "Are you absolutely sure you're supposed to be in LA?" One minute after I picture it, and felt yes, my cell phone rings: "I'm online booking this flight for you," my sister says, "Can you make an 11:10 flight?"

Grabbing a pumpkin spice latte at the San Jose Airport, I notice it's imprinted with Starbucks yuletide wisdom:

"Lost mittens return, cab rides are shared and for a few short weeks crowds endear perfect strangers who exchange warm greetings in lieu of a passing nod."

Our landing in Burbank tarmac is a jolting bounce. A Southwest flight attendent immediately comes on air, "Whoa, did you feelthat!?"

The cabin breaks out in spontaneous laughter at the lightheartedness easing the not-a-perfect landing.

And for the first time ever, I glimpse endearing the not-a-perfect family can be handled in just so light-hearted a manner too...

A grace-filled happy Thanksgiving holiday weekend to my American readers!

Bonus 1: I recently wrote someone: "My path is one of letting go, and as Adya says, then letting go of letting go, of surrender to Love, of complete enchantment and innocent wonder of the Mystery unfolding. Since the Infinite flows into and out of every single thing and person seemingly "out there" every person is an opportunity to explore, taste, discover, be intrigued, enjoy aspects of our own inpenetratable Mystery of Self.

Bonus 2: The starting quote is from...

"THE PARADOX OF OUR AGE: We have bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time; more knowledge, but less judgement; more experts, but more problems; more medicines, but less healthiness; We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; We have become long on quantity, but short on quality. These are times of fast foods but slow digestion; Tall man but short character; Steep profits but shallow relationships. It's a time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room." - His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Nov 16, 2006

A client-friend (they're getting indistinguishable lately, and that's a good thing) that's launching a new company called me on the carpet for not running a simple Craigslist ad through a formal design review. They trotted out the old b-word in there too: brand.

I know I err on loosening up on this blog, and I don't advocate this level of informality for everyone, but lately I'm working with folks with products and services that provide the natural, the beautiful, the intimate and/or help you relax so that you're comfortable expressing yourself, comfortable in your own skin.

Ultimately branding, to me, is about congruity, perhaps harmony.

From mass media we learned to carefully craft a message and broadcast it out to entirely represent you. Yet today you don't only exist behind a masthead's story or when the cathode ray tube is switched on. When anyone can be a photojournalist with simply their cellphone, everything becomes the message. Everything you are being and doing speaks.

The act of blogging can make you full of yourself, or get over yourself. Anyhow, it gets hard to keep up a pretense, er, carefully crafted message, for three years believe me. I actually intended to start this blog to establish visibility as a thought-leader and to develop a platform for a book idea since agents want you to already be a brand when they sign you up with Random House.

Very humorous in retrospect.

I'm old enough to grow up with mass media - not MySpace, not even email. So maybe that's where I learned that I am my image and first impressions count. And that scripted, polished and third-person is ideal. If it's not going to be publishable in big media, don't bother even writing it.

But social media taught me that whatever I am is in constant flux and as updatable as hitting "Publish" or changing the last book read in my profile. That my opinions are malleable, and that the dynamics of open-ended conversation can inspire and influence me. And although I need not change at all, as I need not in any relationship, it is dangerous territory if you're trying to preserve any static, fixed image. And that real and human rather than polished is welcomed, desired, hungered for in this day and age.

A friend wrote yesterday: "Any person is a constraint as well as an enabling opportunity — to become bigger, or something else, to be questioned, to become dissembled or assembled." Well, then the relationships and interactions and engagement in social media have been my undoing. And my reassembly and undoing and... ad finitum.

One outcome is that perfection and professionalism have waned, and I've embraced beauty and passion instead:

"Kant is famous for believing that you must never break a promise, whatever the consequences. Beauty has no such compunctions. Like everything that beckons, beauty is risky and dangerous." - Alexander Nehamas (author of The Art of Living), "An Essay on Beauty and Judgment" (via Adrian Chan, thanks for passing along)

"When you become a tea-master, you also become a gardener. A famous tea-master once asked an apprentice to sweep the terrace in preparation for the ceremony. Conscientiously, the young Buddhist swept and swept and swept. Every leaf the tree had shed he swept away. Blistered and exhausted, he longed for his master to compliment him on a job well done. Instead, the teacher scolded him, instructing him that beauty is not perfection. Perfection is not obtainable. Leaves will continue to fall. A few random leaves are perfectly beautiful. Zen." - Alexandra Stoddard, "Tea Celebrations: The Way to Serenity"

But "f***ing cool" is not a "business appropriate" phrase. It's unprofessional. So while we may want our customers to feel it, sure, we certainly can't have one of our employees saying it. Heavens no. According to some folks within Sun, anyway. It seems that the insightful tech blogger Tim Bray--who happens to be a Sun employee--used the words, "f***ing cool" (but without the asterisks) to describe Sun's Project Blackbox, and he took some interesting heat for it from both outside and inside the company."

"That is so old school/old media. Mike is a human being. It's up to the people behind startups to get to know him instead of paying some hack PR firm to send those [standard-template Dear blogger letters]...